The Void Princess 11: Us and Them

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I know it’s going to feel really stupid to say it. But it feels even stupider to let it linger, so.

I think those are aliens, I tell Laika.

Sharp agreement. Yep. He thinks those are aliens, too.

Which is absurd. I mean, not the existence of aliens; I think everyone assumes that somewhere out there in the vast universe, other things must be alive. Earth can’t be the only planet to have created life. But on Venus? Right next door to Earth? What are the odds?

We don’t know, I guess. That’s kind of the point. Earth is a sample size of one, so we can’t actually predict… well, we do know. The odds are one hundred per cent. Because they’re right here where we can see them.

Statistics are stupid.

And I’m not thinking clearly.

But when you think about it, really think about the situation, aliens do make sense, don’t they? These Maxwell crystals. I’d kind of been assuming that they naturally grew on Venus or something, but upon reflection, that doesn’t really work. The whole reason that the survey team had been sent out here was that someone had detected a change in the light on the atmosphere of Venus, meaning the crystals were new, or at least newly exposed. Maybe they’d been growing underground, but in the millions of years of Venusian history, did it really make any sense for them to become exposed only now? No. They were recent, surely; they couldn’t be something that the planet had been producing ever since it had had the physical conditions that it had. They would surely have been exposed sooner if they were.

They were new, meaning they were either a recently (on a planetary scale) developed technology, or they’d been brought in from somewhere else. And they certainly hadn’t been developed by humans and then brought here. That makes absolutely no sense in light of what we know about the survey team’s employers.

So. Aliens. The Maxwell crystals make that perfectly clear, when you think about it.

Also, the Y-shaped beings clinging to the glowing blue crystal walls of the cavern make that perfectly clear. When you think about it. They’re very unlikely to be some human-developed genetic experiment, for similar reasons– nobody’s behaviour makes sense if that’s the case.

I’ve seen video of Earth animals called ‘sea stars’, and the… Venusians, possibly?… look a little bit like those. Three arms shaped like long, blunt-tipped triangles spread out from a single central point and grip at the walls, floor, and roof of the cavern. There are, oh, maybe thirty of them in the room, and they’re not particularly large. Each arm is as long as my forearm, making them about the size of a backpack. Their flesh looks soft, with slightly rough and pebbly skin, like a dry tongue. They’re mostly still, but the few that are moving about move as if there’s no bone in those arms, nothing rigid to restrict movement.

The atmosphere in here is clearly different to the atmosphere outside; the air is thick with some sort of steam. I check the air pressure, temperature and radiation in the cavern to be sure my space suit can keep me alive out there, then suit up quickly and climb out of Laika for a better look. A better look at the aliens. Who are on Venus. And also directly in front of me. Those aliens.

My space suit has a fair amount of monitoring equipment on it. Heat, magnetics, little cameras with different kinds of lights and crystal clear zooms. It’s a Princess’ suit; it’s built with the assumption that it’s mostly going to be used for emergency external repairs. So I have a fair bit to work with for looking at the aliens. The aliens on Venus. The aliens that I –

Okay, enough of that. There’s work to be done.

The cavern itself seems to be constructed, unsurprisingly, from Maxwell crystals. Unlike the shelter for the survey team (or indeed, the tunnel on the other side of the airlock), they’re not growing out in spikes; the walls look almost smooth. Almost. There are regular little ridges all over them.

I press a hand to the wall, but of course I can’t feel anything through my glove. The crystal looks odd, too; it’s not one flat sheet of crystal, but several layers, each about a centimetre thick, stacked. I can make out the edges as lines of slightly brighter blue light. Some points seem to glow more than others, although it’s hard to be certain through the steam.

Something – one of the aliens – comes close enough to touch my hand, then starts rapidly climbing up my arm. I resist the immediate urge to leap back and slam it into the wall to get it off – that would probably be a diplomatic blunder, and Laika and I don’t know how to work the airlock to get back out, so, probably best not to start killing anyone. I stand stock still as it wraps its limbs about my arm and crawls its way up, spreading itself, out – inspecting me, I suppose. I have no idea what its senses are like; it has nothing I can clearly identify as eyes, and I don’t know if it has any other means of discerning my shape at a distance. It doesn’t seem to have any trouble climbing up the space suit. And over my shoulder. And –

Two alien arms wrap very quickly around my head, and it takes everything I have not to panic. My alarm spikes Laika’s alarm, which spikes mine further, but I stay stock still and tell myself that I’m safe. Well, not safe, exactly. But the alien on me isn’t a danger. I doubt very much that it has the strength to breach a space helmet, if that’s what it wants to do.

In fact, it can’t seem to grip the helmet. Whatever method of climbing lets it scale the crystal walls and the fabric of my space suit doesn’t seem to work on the sheer visor. The underside of an alien arm obscures most of my vision and, hardly one to waste such an opportunity, I turn on the light inside my helmet for a better look.

There’s a surprising amount going on on the underside of the alien arm.

There’s a whole lot of flexible, semitransparent hooks that I think are part of its method of movement; for gripping, probably. As well as dozens of fine extrusions, like fleshy hairs, that reach out to touch a surface and then contract to pull the creature along; they don’t seem to be having any more luck sticking to my helmet than the hooks are. There’s also a bunch of large pores all over the underside that open up to reveal brightly coloured internal areas; red spots that seem to open and close more or less randomly, and yellow spots that all open as soon as I turn on the light.

Hmm.

I turn the inner light off, take a small handheld torch from my belt, and turn that on. Shining it through one side of my helmet, I’m able to shine it on a specific part of the arm’s underside. Some of the yellow pores open up all over, but far, far more open up in the centre of the torch’s beam.

The yellow pores are light sensitive. The red aren’t. Interesting.

I convey this to Laika, who immediately reminds me that this part of the creature had previously been against the Maxwell crystals on the wall. I ask him why this matters. He reminds me, in the mental tone of someone talking to an idiot, that Maxwell crystals absorb heat and emit blue light, and sends me an image of a light emission electromagnetic colour wheel. I have more interesting things to do than deal with his vague hints and his attitude right now, so I turn on the infrared filer in my visor and pay attention, as he’d seemed to be hinting, to the heat.

The aliens are hotter than the rest of the room, though slightly cooler than a human. And on the underside of the arm in front of me, the heat is uneven. The red pores, when they open up, are little spots of heat in a much cooler body. Blood, maybe? Mammals like me cool off by bringing our blood to the surface. With the ability of the Maxwell crystals to absorb heat, pressing blood-filled sacs against them might be an efficient way to cool down.

But I don’t think this is for cooling; or at least, that isn’t its main purpose. The individual little pores suggest that organisation, structure, is important here, that which part is hot matters.

Two sets of pores; emitting heat, receiving light. Two sets or pores, placed to sit against the Maxwell crystals, which receive heat and emit light (blue light, I realise; that’s what Laika meant about the colour wheel, about the reflected light from my white torch looking yellow to my eyes. The pores are specialised to receive blue light, like the crystals emit). Communication of information. Two-way communication.

Laika was right. It is a city, populated by these alien beings, all talking through the crystal walls. A feral city, like Laika said, in the sense that whatever communication system these beings are using would be expected to be incompatible with ours, ‘feral’ by our standards. The crystal itself, is there a mind in there? Surely not; computers need moving parts, don’t they? Logic gates? I don’t know much about computers. I don’t know much about Maxwell crystals either; maybe it is possible. Or maybe the crystals connect to something else as well, somewhere outside this cavern.

My heart races. I resist the urge to swish my tail, in this confined and possibly delicate space. I pace a little, both Laika and myself, in my excitement. Our excitement. Laika tries to get as good a look as he can at the crystal walls, at the substance he exists to study, without damaging them. The alien on me seems to get bored, and crawls down; I stand still long enough for it to safely climb down my leg and scamper for the wall on hundreds of tiny, fleshy tendrils.

Subterranean aliens, I summarise to Laika, who live in caverns made of Maxwell crystals. Who probably interface with the crystals to sense and communicate, although we haven’t confirmed that.How far does their habitat extend, do you think? Just this volcano, or deep into the planet? And are they from here, or from elsewhere?

Elsewhere, Laika says immediately, no doubt in his mind. They are visitors. Like us.

How can you be so sure?

He flashes me his atmospheric readings. The steam. It’s water. The air pressure is very low, the carbon dioxide levels very low, compared to outside. There is no possible way that this environment exists naturally anywhere on this planet.

I nod. The environment we’re in can’t exist on Venus, and they’re keeping the place like this on purpose, so it’s a comfortable environment to them and Venus isn’t. Ergo, they didn’t evolve on Venus. It’s not an airtight argument (it’s possible that they can tolerate a wide variety of environments, for example, and this one is just what’s best for growing Maxwell crystals), but it’s a good argument. Laika is very likely right.

And we might, I suddenly realise, have been interpreting this entire situation the wrong way. Because we approached this place on the assumption that we were rescuing some stranded traveller, and here we are in what I can only assume is an alien settlement, and it occurs to me that the best time to tag their location and go back to the research base to report would have been right before stepping into the airlock, because it doesn’t have any controls that we can see or operate, and we’re essentially trapped in here until and unless the aliens decide to open it for us. I’d been assuming that we were rescuers; that some barely-coherent dragon had reacted to Laika and Valentina’s impulse engines with an accidental soul attack that had gotten a bunch of people killed, and now that we knew the problem, we could save him and it would be fine. But.

But.

We’re not rescuers. And we’ve intruded on a settlement. And the researchers, after they discovered the existence of Maxwell crystals, hadn’t had these problems right away. They’d been setting up, moving people and supplies up and down from Yuri in orbit; moving them in Valentina, who had to be using his impulse engines, right? And there had been no problems. And Laika had been built. And had lived at the survey base long enough to develop deep bonds with the people there. And had been out here, alone with Lyllania, surveying or sample gathering or whatever, and only then were they attacked, and Lyllania and Yuri died. Only after that, were Valentina and his Princess Saru attacked and killed.

It’s probably a mistake to make too many assumptions about alien psychology. There’s not really any reason to expect these beings’ perceptions and motivations to line up with ours in anything but the most basic matters of practical survival. But based on the logical framework I do have, based on the existence of this settlement and the nonexistence of Lyllania and Yuri and Valentina and Saru, this whole situation does look rather a lot more like a highly territorial people responding to a perceived invasion.

If Laika and I aren’t rescuers, what are we? We might be explorers. We might be diplomats in a mission of first contact with an alien species.

We might be prisoners of war.

I put a comforting hand on Laika’s neck. It’s thick glove against metal scales, hardly comforting or intimate, but I resist the urge to climb back inside just yet. I don’t think we’re in immediate danger – if they wanted to kill us, they could have left us on the surface where we were effectively trapped, and confinement is no real danger for over a year, given the supplies inside Laika – but the situation is bigger than us. If we can’t get out of this, if we eventually die here, so does the research team. And then, when Sunrith sends another team expecting them to pick up where the dead team left off, they’ll bring all sorts of safety and backup systems – but they won’t be prepared for this. They’ll probably be cut down too, and if they manage to call for help first, will they know what they’re facing? Will they be able to report that it’s alien contact? If they do… what would be the response? An attempt at peace? Declaring Venus off-limits?

Escalation?

And if these aliens are from elsewhere, which they almost certainly are, do they have a larger civilisation backing them, ready to get involved in the conflict? Even if humanity decides to just leave Venus alone, would they consider that peace or not?

We need to find out what these beings think of us. If there’s conflict, we need to resolve it. Here and now.

I follow the chain of logic in tandem with Laika, swapping the concept back and forth, a consequence of a particularly advanced soul bleed. We need to figure out how to talk to them, I conclude. But how? We can’t communicate through the soul. We don’t even know if we share any senses. We have no common method to transfer information.

Apparently we do, Laika says, looking up.

I follow the direction of his eye cameras. The aliens have all moved off the cavern ceiling, leaving a large patch of uncovered Maxwell crystal, glowing blue – but not uniformly. Against the soft background glow, three shapes glow much brighter. The smallest, a rough Y shape with a thicker centre and rounded tips. The next one, a fair bit larger; a thick body with four stumpy limbs and a huge round head. And the largest, the torso alone large enough to encompass the other two many times over, with four legs and a long tail and a head at the end if a thin, whip-like neck, with some kind of mass folded against its back.

One of them. Me, in my space suit. And Laika. Silhouettes in bright blue, shaped pretty much how I perceive them, how I can understand them.

“Well,” I say aloud, although the space suit’s radio is off and there’s no one to hear me. “That’s certainly a good start.”

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